Distant Worlds 2

[bayonetbrant]

Ok, so who here wants to do a DW2-focused podcast?

 

[Undercovergeek]

Martok

I’m still watching all the little ships go backwards and forwards

[Martok]

I'd be willing to sure, although even I don't feel like I've played the game enough yet.  (Of course, I'll probably still feel that way even after I've spent a couple hundred hours with it. )  DW2 probably isn't *quite* as deep or complex as Shadow Empire, but it's damn close. 


That being said, I'm happy to do a podcast whenever.  (Now we just need 1-2 other folks who are also willing to do so, as we obviously don't want just me rambling about the game by myself for over an hour. )   

[ojsdad]

2 more observations;

1.  If you have policies set to suggest ships to build, the AI will want to build a lot of military ships to patrol you colonized systems.  I'm not sure having that many ships is necessary.
2.  I've salvaged a couple of ships and had them join a fleet.  In stead of heading to the nearest system to get fuel, and then proceeding to the fleet, it heads straight to the fleet with no fuel, thus taking a very long time.  It reminds me of DW:U where the ships navigators couldn't plot a course with stops at a gas station. 

[Huw the Poo]

1.  If you have policies set to suggest ships to build, the AI will want to build a lot of military ships to patrol you colonized systems.  I'm not sure having that many ships is necessary.

The problem is how long it takes for a fleet to move to another system. In my experience when another empire declares war the attack comes almost immediately. They can destroy all your stations long before a fleet arrives. So on balance, until I can field stations that are armed to the teeth, I'd rather have one fleet per system.

2.  I've salvaged a couple of ships and had them join a fleet.  In stead of heading to the nearest system to get fuel, and then proceeding to the fleet, it heads straight to the fleet with no fuel, thus taking a very long time.  It reminds me of DW:U where the ships navigators couldn't plot a course with stops at a gas station.

Don't get me started on the fuel issues in this game. Like a tanker trying to fuel a ship at warp, endlessly jumping to catch up to a ship at warp and thus tying up TWO of your ships at 33% speed until they reach their destination (where fuel is probably waiting anyway).

Unfortunately, the more I play the game, the more broken I realise it is. I'm probably going to shelve it for quite a while.

[Martok]

What's especially frustrating is that a lot of the fuel issues present in the current game, were also problems in DW:U.  I'm disappointed -- and a little gobsmacked -- that this has apparently still not been addressed (at least sufficiently so) in DW2. 



Another minor gripe that's been bothering since launch:  The camera. 

Why can I not pan the camera around at whatever angle I wish?  What was the point of the game switching from 2D to 3D, whilst simultaneously restricting the player's ability to move the camera around?  If they're going to give us these nice-looking, big-ass planets & moons, but I then can't pan around to overhead & underneath shots so I can admire them in all their glory, then why'd the devs bother doing all that in the first place?  Gah. 

[ojsdad]

Todays patch

Spoiler: ShowHide

Changes in the 1.0.2.4 build:

CRASH FIXES
- fixed game hang that was causing saves and loads to fail
- fixed rare crash when applying nebula effects to ships
- fixed rare crash while initiating particle effects

PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS
- altered asset streaming timeout to reduce video memory usage

FLEET AND SHIP FIXES
- now exclude ships that cannot jump when determining fleet jump speed (previously was blocking some missions)
- improved logic for fighters boarding their carriers when the carrier is preparing to jump. Normally when carrier is jumping they will wait for fighters to board, unless very distant. But when carrier is escaping then fighter boarding time is reduced and fighters may be left behind (destroyed)
- improved performance of exploration ship mission selection when in late-game and most systems explored
- fixed bug where ships were sometimes overcautious about travelling to locations with effects, e.g. black holes with ranged damage effects

OTHER FIXES
- reenabled maximum research queue limit of 15 projects

[Martok]

Glad to see them starting to address some of the ship/fleet logic issues. 

[ojsdad]

So, I have Independent Colonies set to the lowest setting.  In a galaxy of over 2000 star systems, and 27 either fully or partially explored, I've found 3 independent colonies.   

[Martok]

Just watch -- they'll turn out to be the only ones on the entire map.  They just happened to cluster around your starting position...   

[ojsdad]

Opened a thread at the Matrix Forum about Independent Colonies. 

https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=10151&t=382015

I've started 3 games and had Independent Colonies option set to the lowest setting, Very Rare. However, in the first 30 years of game play, in each of the 3 games that I had started, I'd come across 3 separate ICs. Each game was created with 2000 star systems in a varied cluster galaxy. In the latest attempt, I've fully explored 29 systems, partially explored 43, and have 1935 unknown.

What is the purpose of setting the likely hood of encountering ICs if they're all going to get placed close to your home world?

[ojsdad]

A couple of more patches have dropped in the last few days;

Changes in the 1.0.2.6 build:

Spoiler: ShowHide

Changes in the 1.0.2.6 build:

CRASH FIXES
- adjusted how some vertex buffers were created to improve stability (more to come on this)
- fixed bug where shield impact model vertices were sometimes setup incorrectly
- fixed rare crash when ship is turning
- fixed rare crash when initiating particle effect
- fixed rare crash when assigning ship mission

PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS
- increased multi-threading support for some game logic, improves performance, especially for large late-games

FLEET AND SHIP COORDINATION IMPROVEMENTS
- added full Prepare and Attack missions for fleets (attack, raid, capture, bombard). This is the default right-click fleet attack mission type and will also be used by automated fleets. Fleets will now automatically refuel (when need fuel) or waypoint (if need to regroup) before undertaking their attack mission. If they do not need refuelling or regrouping then they will attack the target directly. When refuelling or regrouping the fleet will synchronize their final jump to the attack target.

Changes in the 1.0.2.8 build:  This dropped today.

Spoiler: ShowHide

CRASH FIXES
- fixed savegame corruption when save while expired messages are being purged (note that some past saves were corrupted and if these do not load in 1.0.2.8 they are unrecoverable)
- fixed hang on save due to fighters incorrectly taking their parent carriers 'Prepare and Attack' missions
- fixed rare crash when iterating fleet ships
- fixed rare crash when sending message to empire
- fixed rare crash when iterating empire messages
- fixed crash when clearing pursuers from target

RENDERING FIXES
- changed how vertex buffers are handled to reduce video memory usage and reduce crashes
- now more carefully check for missing buffers when rendering shield impact effects

FLEETS AND SHIPS
- now take more care to ensure nearby ships are added to fleets, thus better preserving fleet cohesion
- exclude ships with manually assigned attack missions when determine whether to break off attack against a target (target jumps outside engagement range or fuel range, etc)
- fleets and ships now better at retaining attack missions against targets that jump to another location, especially when target remains in same system
- fixed bug blocking direct attack fleet missions
- shortened wait time before attacking when fleets regroup at a waypoint (Prepare and Attack), i.e. fleets commence attack phase faster once reach waypoint

OTHER
- ensure freighters with short hyperdrive jump range are not selected for distant transport missions (should fix freighters with Skip Drives sometimes dumping cargo)

[Martok]

Erik & Elliot posted a State of the Game and Update Roadmap as well: 

Spoiler: ShowHide

As of March 28th, 2022 v1.0.2.8

Hello to everyone in the Distant Worlds 2 community,

First, Elliot and I would like to thank all of our customers for your patience and your support since Distant Worlds 2 was released. For those who have experienced serious issues, we apologize and especially appreciate your understanding as we work to resolve these.

(TLDR: We are prioritizing Critical Issues, Performance Issues and Gameplay issues in that order. We will be putting more time into testing beta updates before they go official to avoid introducing new save or other problems. We will be switching to a slower update schedule to make additional testing possible and to improve the stability of official updates going forward.)

It’s clear, in hindsight, that while we had over 300 testers and DW2 was in alpha and beta testing for a year, we did not have a large enough testing pool to catch all critical issues related to hardware configurations. It’s also clear that despite the best efforts of a lot of very good volunteer testers, we didn’t achieve the level of polish that many of you expected at release.

Since release, we have been working overtime to address those issues preventing gameplay for some customers, while also addressing other serious issues affecting a wider range of players. This has resulted in fourteen new updates in the two or so weeks since release. These updates have fixed many crashes, performance issues and gameplay issues for many players.
Unfortunately, not all the critical issues are resolved (though many have been) and the pace of the updates has also created some serious new issues from time to time, including some save file problems in 1.0.2.2 and 1.0.2.6 that should not have made it to a public release.

While the urgency of getting DW2 working for everyone has been driving us to investigate and iterate as quickly as possible, it’s clear that we can’t maintain the pace of an update every day or two and it’s also clear that in that rush we have not allowed time for enough testing between releases. This is going to change going forward as I’ll explain below.

Priority #1 - Issues Preventing Gameplay

Our first priority remains resolving critical issues preventing gameplay for some customers. The most common of these remain frequent crashes (especially in battle) or crashes on startup or black screens on startup. In addition, we have issues where some very high end GPUs are trying to run DW2 while remaining in some kind of power-saving mode, thus causing much worse than expected performance, or where dual GPU systems are trying to run DW2 on the integrated rather than dedicated GPU to some degree, causing slowdowns and crashes.

We are working on all of these and have brought in Matrix/Slitherine’s Technical Director to work together with Elliot on some of these issues, especially those which appear to be at a lower level than most of the game code.

The main challenge and delay in resolving these has been the great difficulty in reproducing them. We are proceeding in two main directions right now. :

First, we are re-engineering how DW2 creates and manages vertex buffers, which appear to be at the core of many of the issues, especially with AMD GPUs and their drivers. The first iteration of vertex buffer changes is in 1.0.2.8 and we hope this will help many customers.

Second, we are working to improve the low level GPU identification and selection code to make sure that on systems with dual GPUs DW2 is always running on the correct one and that very high end GPUs no longer try to take a nap while DW2 is running. We expect efforts in this area to reach the public within about a week after this roadmap is posted.

Priority #2 - Performance

Our second priority has been performance and while this remains a high priority, we have already made major performance improvements for many systems in the last two weeks and we hope that resolving the remaining low level GPU issues will resolve most of the remaining performance concerns, where systems are above our minimum specifications and playing a reasonable galaxy size and resolution for their hardware.

It’s important to note that we also have seen instances where customers are running maximum size 2000 star galaxies on minimum specification hardware, which will likely never result in good performance, but performance across the board has seen significant improvements and that will continue. We also plan in the future to add more guidance in galaxy setup as to which galaxy sizes are recommended for systems closer to the lower end of the hardware specification and which are suitable for systems at the higher end.

There are also some concerns on certain systems regarding performance in nebulas, with certain map overlays and with the research screen which will need additional work if the low level fixes do not resolve these on all systems. If needed, we will address these more specific performance concerns after the general performance issues are resolved.

Priority #3 - Gameplay

Our third priority has been addressing major gameplay concerns, such as some espionage balance issues, some diplomacy issues and most recently fleet and ship coordination issues. We will be continuing to fit these in as we can and we expect the immediate priorities in this area to be as follows:

1. Further fleet and ship behavior polish, especially relating to interactions with manual orders and fuel tankers. This should be coming in the first beta update this week and hopefully be finished in the next official update.

2. Improve quality of live for manual players with regard to multi-selection of ships and the available orders and automation settings

3. Additional guidance in the UI on the cost of low suitability colonization and support costs for existing and new colonies

4. Improve pathing issues related to nebula storms as well as home systems being generated within nebulas This should also improve pathfinding issues that could in rare cases result in ridiculous paths around the galaxy.

5. Improve auto-design at certain tech levels and ship hull levels for certain ships, especially small troop transports, colony ships and fuel tankers, to make sure they have the necessary ion defenses, speed and range for their missions.

6. Address rare issues with messaging that could cause rapidly repeating/looping messages especially relating to story events and threats like the Hive and Planet Destroyer. Also improve message handling, especially regarding attack notification messages in the late game.

7. Resolve issues relating to some cases where the wrong race is chosen suitability-wise for colonization or migration

8. Polish Espionage and Diplomacy further. Adjust the Espionage difficulties to the desired range and to investigate and fix reported issues with some higher end treaty types.

9. Investigate the reports of issues with either automated stock maintain levels or freighter and passenger ship construction for the Private Sector to ensure all is working as intended. Some progress on this may already have been made in the 1.0.2.8 update.

10. Adjust the corruption scaling to avoid the situation, especially at difficulty settings above Normal, where large colony income could decrease as the colony approached maximum population.

There are also other reported gameplay issues beyond these top 10 which we will also address as we go forward, this is by no means an exhaustive list, but there are our initial goals.

Finally, let me discuss the new update schedule. This week we are releasing 1.0.2.8 as an official update today. Going forward, we plan to release beta updates on Thursdays on Steam and GOG and official update on all stores on certain Tuesdays. That may shift to a once every two week schedule as the most critical issues are resolved. This will not slow down our development, but it will allow us more time to test each beta update and make sure that as much as humanly possible, we’re only taking steps forward and no more steps back.

For those customers still affected by critical issues after 1.0.2.8, we’re sorry we couldn’t get every critical issue resolved yet with our quick updates to date, but know that you remain our highest priority and we won’t stop until we make sure every system within our minimum specifications is able to play DW2 as it was intended.

Thank you again if you took the time to read all of this and for those who have been unhappy with how DW2 has worked on their systems, please check in at least at the end of each week going forward and try the newest update to let us know if things have improved for you.

Sincerely,

Erik Rutins and Elliot Gibbs
Matrix Games and CodeForce

Overall, it appears they have a pretty solid handle on what the main issues are, and how to address them going forward.  Hopefully it means a game that's in much better shape a couple months down the road. 

Currently, DW2 has a "Mixed" rating on Steam, with an average score of 66%.  I can't say it's unwarranted, but it's definitely going to hurt sales.  Hopefully the situation gets better over the course of this spring/summer as patches make the game more stable and balanced. 

[Huw the Poo]

Currently, DW2 has a "Mixed" rating on Steam, with an average score of 66%.  I can't say it's unwarranted, but it's definitely going to hurt sales.

I have some sympathy for them with regard to technical issues, as 300 testers probably is too few to catch them all, and they're correct in my opinion to focus on the people who can't even play. My sympathy ends there though. I can't believe they thought the game was ready to release when it comes to gameplay though. The way refuelling works (or doesn't), for example - how was that not caught in testing? It's blindingly obvious. Or the laughably poor implementation of diplomacy (for example I've had the same empire declare war on me half a dozen times in the space of an hour, always asking for peace within minutes).

Mixed is, frankly, what the game deserves at present.

[ojsdad]

300 testers doesn't sound too low a number, however, based on some of the technical issues that some people you've got to wonder was there much variety in the hardware mix that those testers use. 

For the game play issue, were they getting much feedback from the testers or if most of the testers were just wanting to play the game and didn't give any real feedback. 

Does Slitherine/Matrix have any other high end games like this.  I can think of Command, but I'm not sure it pushes the envelope this much. 

Here is where I'm disappointed at with DW2 at this time.  DW2 seems to be just a new version of DWU with new graphics engine and GUI.  I'm not seeing anything that's new to the game.  The story line looks like it's going to be the same from DW2.  All of the old game mechanics are there with a few tweaks, but nothing major.  And in a few cases, they seem to have taken a step back.  Maybe I (we) had too many high hopes for DW2.  Maybe after having played Stellaris for years now has tainted us.  Take research as an example.  DW2s big new change is hiding tech.  That's good for about 1 play through.  Compare that to Stellaris random research choices, which, even going back to an earlier save your not guaranteed the same choices.  Or the camera, as Martok pointed out.  in Stellaris you can pan 360 degrees on both X and Y axis of an object but not in DW2,

I do like the new GUI for the most part.  And I feel like I'm getting enough information out of the game to better understand what's happening in certain areas, like colony net income/loss.